xanafandomcom-20200214-history
Veda
i don't wanna be no man's woman Veda is an Elene born during the reign of King Aldreas, but not in Elenia; her father had been exiled months before her birth, and his fiancée followed him later when she was certain she was expecting. Their daughter was born in Cammoria and raised in a hidden compound in Pelosia, largely isolated from the outside world and protected by mercenaries in her father's pay. It was a strange and far less than ideal upbringing, her parents' turbulent relationship becoming increasingly volatile as her father got closer to some goal she largely didn't understand. The impact on Veda was subtle but distinct, and by the time she was about ten years old she'd already realized that she was essentially the only thing left they agreed on. Her father's daughter through and through, she had a not unnoticeable tendency to take his 'side' when she perceived an argument and spent large parts of her childhood idolizing him. It was easy to adore a father who was - while tempestuous and having a tendency to create chaos wherever he went, including their home - often away, leaving her mother to frequently have to play all the roles involved parenting and letting him return to a child who felt he was a relief from her disciplinarian. Since he was often absent, when he was around he had a tendency to spoil her in response to that; he expected her to obey him when he did put his foot down, and she would, but most of the time he indulged her outrageously. He and her mother both sheltered Veda to the best of their ability - the success of which was debatable and definitely didn't work out exactly how anyone planned for it to. Her childhood was very isolated and later very isolat''ing'', socialized poorly at best and instilled with a sense of superiority and mistrust. She was disinterested in learning about politics and indifferently absorbed the lessons on faith and religion that presented the latter as a tool by which the former could be manipulated... ...until Martel's campaign against Chyrellos. At the age of roughly ten, Veda was indulged in one of the rarities - being taken from her home on a trip with her parents, as Martel decided that this time his family would join him. It was arguably not one of the better decisions he made in his final months, calling for some creativity on his part when Petrana and Veda had to be sent away while he handled something they really couldn't be part of (or even near) and cementing some unfortunate basic beliefs of Veda's. Her first experience of religion was at the knee of Otha's general in a corrupt war of the faithful; at this point, shielding her from what was going on around them was beyond Petra's capabilities. Veda died in Zemoch at the age of eleven, smothered under the wreckage of the temple after witnessing the deaths of her parents. i've other work i want to get done And then reality sort of hiccuped. In two universes cataclysmic, reality-shaking events took place simultaneously; the death of an Elder God in one, and in the other the final righting of what was meant to be. When the dust settled and time started moving again, the survivors at Korim had two more in their party who'd slipped through the cracks - a little girl and her mother who should've been dead and weren't. The best explanation that anyone managed to give was the suggestion that they hadn't been where they were meant to be, and had been among the righted changes when reality adjusted its trousers. Veda doesn't know, really, but she accepts this as good enough. After Korim, they recuperated for a short while at Dal Perivor and then - Petra and Ce'Nedra having bonded swiftly when the younger woman took charge of Veda while Petra couldn't - accompanied Ce'Nedra and Garion back to Riva. Their lives there became permanent in fits and starts, first with Petra making herself so useful that declaring her a royal advisor was a formality to accommodate the fact she'd been doing the job for a while. Veda was raised alongside the royal children, treating Geran and Beldaran (later, Ce'Vanna) as her younger siblings and learning to depend on their parents in much the same way she depended on her mother. Their relationships were all rocky, with Veda alternately expecting the three adults to hang the stars in the sky and then refusing to trust anything they said to her; she lashed out as it became clear her mother's attachment to them was romantic rather than platonic and perceived it as a betrayal of her father's memory. She veered between relying on them and distrusting the informal nature of their family arrangement, viewing herself as not only a failure in keeping her parents happy as they had been but also the less loved child of her family now, the unacknowledged and unacknowledgeable. (You know, teenage stuff.) Her legal presence in this new world was owed to Ce'Nedra, who leaned on her uncle to officially adopt Lady Petrana and her daughter into the House Borune, making them members of the current Imperial family in Tolnedra. Life proceeded relatively comfortably; Veda embraced Tolnedran culture with both arms in the hopes of pleasing her foster mother (a rousing success by all accounts), and was browbeaten into letting her foster father teach her control of sorcery when her ability exploded messily onto the scene during an adolescent tantrum. (All the water in the fountain briefly became fire, which had the side effect of startling her so badly she settled down - although she then expected Garion to fix it, and immediately.) The suggestion (reasonable, she felt) that he was not the boss of her and not even the most experienced sorcerer in the world anyway wasn't a great success. At eighteen, Veda went with her extended family on a state visit to Arendia, where coincidentally some of the Dalasian Mimbrates had made the pilgrimage to their ancestral home of Vo Mimbre, and it was there that she met Sir Ceredu, a Viscount of Dal Ceredan. All three of her parents had assorted objections to the courtship and eventual marriage - ranging from 'Perivor is so far away' to 'but he's not very bright, Veda, is he?' to 'don't you think he's a little old for you' - which she summarily ignored, cajoling and pleading and demanding and eventually getting her own way. When she married, she styled herself the Viscountess Borune - an eccentricity that she managed to finesse the court at Dal Perivor into indulging - and would have, she thinks, lived out a happily quiet life there if not for that storm. Not long after the birth of their first child, Mayaseralle, Ceredu took a brief trip to the mainland and it would've been unremarkable and uneventful besides the storm that wrecked the ship on its return to Perivor. He was thrown from the deck and battered against the rocks on the beach, surviving long enough to hold on for several days at his home...unfortunately, he was bleeding internally and it wasn't helped by the physician's decision (unaware of the internal damage) to bleed him. He died, and after the necessary arrangements were made and Veda had been repeatedly prevented from going anywhere near the physician who'd treated her husband, at her own suggestion and with the eventual agreement of both her mother and her brother-in-law, Veda packed up her daughter and left for Riva. The long journey gave her time to think. i haven't traveled this far to become no man's woman 'cause i'm tired of it and i'm so scared of it that i'll never trust again Morgana Kit MacDougal Drusilla 'cause a man can fake you, take your soul and make you miserable in so much pain gentlemans. i never wanna be no man's woman An inborn and mentally-driven gift, sorcery is naturally occurring but requires education to properly - and, most importantly, safely - wield. It usually manifests at adolescence; sometimes later but never sooner, and invariably with some kind of intense emotion, usually frustration or anger. Belgarath threw a rock, Senji turned an entire wall and everything in it into solid gold, and Veda changed water into fire. Beldin has theorized that one of the reasons they don't see more incidents of accidental sorcerers - like Senji - is because the most important rule is that nothing in the universe can be unmade. The command 'be not' will result in the sorcerer's spell being reversed on the sorcerer, a pretty horrific way to go all things considered and since when angry the instinct of a lot of people is to destroy the focus of their rage... ...well, don't do that. Seriously. Belgarath describes sorcery as limited only by the limitations of the mind, and while most practitioners will have personal specialties and weaknesses, it's essentially true. Anything can be done - allowing for the fact that sorcery is often as difficult and draining as hard physical labour, in direct correlation with the intricacy and scale of what the sorcerer wishes to accomplish - but not everything should be done. Messing with the weather is a no-no for example, unless you want to spend a year fixing rogue weather patterns lest the world get completely fucked up. (You don't.) Telepathy isn't as private as you'd really like, and other sorcerers will usually notice when you start casting spells in their vicinity. For the practicalities, it's defined by Belgarath as 'the Will and the Word'; the sorcerer takes a specific outcome that they want, the means by which they're going to achieve it, and summons their 'will', which is then released with a verbal command. It doesn't actually matter what the word itself is, but some people prefer to have a bit of panache about it. Since the only power used is drawn from the sorcerer themselves, this can be draining - and dangerous if they overshoot their ability. Once committed to a course of action, they can't draw back, and if they don't have the strength to achieve what they're trying to do, it's entirely possible to die in the effort. (Similarly, releasing their will slowly - or holding it back once it's been built, waiting for a mark - can be, while not impossible, extremely challenging.) Impulse control is a very important part of the study of sorcery because of the simple fact that once you start, it doesn't go away and they will continue to make things happen; it's generally considered to be important for various reasons including safety (of said sorcerer and everyone around them) that there be some control exerted over exactly what those things will be. i just wanna be my own woman Condolence Dorothy Parker They hurried here, as soon as you had died, Their faces damp with haste and sympathy, And pressed my hand in theirs, and smoothed my knee, And clicked their tongues, and watched me, mournful-eyed. Gently they told me of that Other Side- How, even then, you waited there for me, And what ecstatic meeting ours would be. Moved by the lovely tale, they broke, and cried. And when I smiled, they told me I was brave, And they rejoiced that I was comforted, And left to tell of all the help they gave. But I had smiled to think how you, the dead, So curiously preoccupied and grave, Would laugh, could you have heard the things they said. i haven't traveled this far to become no man's woman Veda is based on works by David Eddings that I don't own. I'm not her played-by, Katie McGrath, and the lyrics used here are Sinead O'Connor's No Man's Woman. Category:Characters Category:Resurrected